5 ms·

Can someone give us a clue what's going on in this thread? I can't follow the jargon at all.

colechristensen 11y ago
A group of people failing to cooperate, communicate, or generally work together in a reasonable way. It's both a failure of each individual to work together constructively amongst some confusion or disagreement and a systematic failure of the whole organization to set expectations and have reasonable clear remedies for such conflicts.
geofft 11y ago
"ITP" stands for "intent to package". When you want to package something in Debian, you file a Debian bug with "ITP" in the subject. (The bug is filed against "wnpp", an entry in the bug tracker that doesn't actually represent a Debian package but represents "work-needing and prospective packages.") The ITP bug does not actually do anything with regards to the upload process; it's simply a coordination point. You can ignore the ITP process and upload a package straight to "NEW". For historical reasons, the team that maintains the Debian package archive is called the "ftp-master" team, though the archive is generally retrieved via HTTP. They have the final authority (subject to, like, a project-wide vote or whatever) on what actually goes into the archive, and it's their job to prevent things like packages being hijacked from an active maintainer, in addition to verifying free software status, non-atrocious packaging quality, etc. Part of that verification takes time, especially for brand-new packages. What happened in this bug is that Daniel did not file an ITP and uploaded the package, and Serge did file an ITP and uploaded the package, and the NEW queue got both of them. Who's in the right is pretty unclear. Daniel had his package in the queue well ahead, but Serge followed the procedure, and the very reason the procedure exists is to avoid conflicts like this. So Ansgar, a member of the ftp-master team, told them to work it out amongst themselves (a common response for conflicts). Later, Paul, also on the ftp-master team, said the same thing in stronger words, in the email rejecting both of their uploads. Serge also had uploaded a newer version of cgmanager which unblocked systemd-shim (the compatibility layer for running non-systemd systems). Daniel had uploaded an older version that was not useful for systemd-shim. So Daniel and Serge worked things out amongst themselves, except Daniel did not actually get around to uploading his package, so Serge uploaded his original package after timing out on Daniel. Serge was technically in the right, but that isn't really the metric. Serge was also probably socially in the right, but this was unfortunately a murky case. Paul accepted Serge's next upload after hearing both Serge and Daniel saying that they were working together, even though Serge just uploaded his original package (without Daniel's packaging and without listing him as a maintainer). There are obvious echos with what happened in Debian Live: Daniel feels hurt because other people ignored work he was doing in favor of their own thing, and everyone else felt frustrated because Daniel's work didn't support things that the rest of Debian needed, and there was no sign of that changing in a timely fashion.

A group of people failing to cooperate, communicate, or generally work together in a reasonable way. It's both a failure of each individual to work together constructively amongst some confusion or disagreement and a systematic failure of the whole organization to set expectations and have reasonable clear remedies for such conflicts.

geofft 11y ago

"ITP" stands for "intent to package". When you want to package something in Debian, you file a Debian bug with "ITP" in the subject. (The bug is filed against "wnpp", an entry in the bug tracker that doesn't actually represent a Debian package but represents "work-needing and prospective packages.") The ITP bug does not actually do anything with regards to the upload process; it's simply a coordination point. You can ignore the ITP process and upload a package straight to "NEW". For historical reasons, the team that maintains the Debian package archive is called the "ftp-master" team, though the archive is generally retrieved via HTTP. They have the final authority (subject to, like, a project-wide vote or whatever) on what actually goes into the archive, and it's their job to prevent things like packages being hijacked from an active maintainer, in addition to verifying free software status, non-atrocious packaging quality, etc. Part of that verification takes time, especially for brand-new packages. What happened in this bug is that Daniel did not file an ITP and uploaded the package, and Serge did file an ITP and uploaded the package, and the NEW queue got both of them. Who's in the right is pretty unclear. Daniel had his package in the queue well ahead, but Serge followed the procedure, and the very reason the procedure exists is to avoid conflicts like this. So Ansgar, a member of the ftp-master team, told them to work it out amongst themselves (a common response for conflicts). Later, Paul, also on the ftp-master team, said the same thing in stronger words, in the email rejecting both of their uploads. Serge also had uploaded a newer version of cgmanager which unblocked systemd-shim (the compatibility layer for running non-systemd systems). Daniel had uploaded an older version that was not useful for systemd-shim. So Daniel and Serge worked things out amongst themselves, except Daniel did not actually get around to uploading his package, so Serge uploaded his original package after timing out on Daniel. Serge was technically in the right, but that isn't really the metric. Serge was also probably socially in the right, but this was unfortunately a murky case. Paul accepted Serge's next upload after hearing both Serge and Daniel saying that they were working together, even though Serge just uploaded his original package (without Daniel's packaging and without listing him as a maintainer). There are obvious echos with what happened in Debian Live: Daniel feels hurt because other people ignored work he was doing in favor of their own thing, and everyone else felt frustrated because Daniel's work didn't support things that the rest of Debian needed, and there was no sign of that changing in a timely fashion.